Monday, April 07, 2014

The editor of the high-brow German weekly Die Zeit has created a slick, biannual international magazine in English, featuring "best-of" content. It's called The Berlin State of Mind and is something of a throwback to the glossy coffee table magazines of old. Christophe Amend says that he and his colleagues think there's a market for this kind of thing, a cross between the New York Times magazine and its sister T. When Deutsche Welleasked him if such magazines weren't dying out, he said

It's not dying. Die Zeit has a very successful website, and it is very successful on all social networks. But I think the more we all live in a digital media world, the more we feel the need to take a beautiful magazine into our hands and read it. To flip through the pages and enjoy it. If you look at the medium blogs, especially the younger ones like fashion blogs, what do they talk about? Mostly printed magazines! If a magazine like Vogue in America runs a cover with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West or Fantastic Man runs a cover with Boris Becker, the blogs discuss it first. The more digital the world becomes, the greater the need for nicely done glossy magazines.